This application relates generally to asset and object management and tracking. More specifically, the disclosure provided herein relates to an asset management service for distributed computing environments.
Managing business or personal assets can be expensive. For businesses, asset management can be an expensive and resource-consuming part of the business. Some companies may create or purchase expensive asset control systems. These systems may track assets by serial numbers, identification numbers, and/or other identifiers. These and other information associated with the assets may be stored in a database or other data files.
In some instances, asset management systems may use custom labels. The custom labels may include, for example, bar code labels, UPC labels, serial number labels, or the like. The labels also can include radio frequency identification (“RFID”) tags or other devices that may be affixed to the assets. The labels can include information identifying the asset. Thus, identifying information on the labels may be manually read or scanned at various times for a number of reasons.
Some equipment for reading bar codes, or the like, may be expensive, bulky, and/or may pose health or environmental hazards. Thus, some businesses continue to employ manual processes for managing assets. Manually reading or otherwise managing asset information, as well as entering and/or tracking the asset information, may be cost prohibitive in terms of manual labor, opportunity costs, or the like. Furthermore, manual processes may be prone to human error, fraud, and/or may be time consuming. As such, these and other approaches for managing assets may be of little to no use for many business and/or individuals.
Similarly, enabling asset management and tracking across geographically distributed locations can be challenging. For example, some business may operate across multiple environments, states, countries, and/or even continents that may or may not have network or power infrastructure suitable for enabling asset management and/or tracking. In particular, providing a distributed information technology (“IT”) solution for such distributed environments may be expensive, may require international network links, and/or otherwise may be expensive in terms of resources.